Posted
by
Soulskillon Friday January 25, 2013 @02:50PM
from the hey-why-not dept.

An anonymous reader writes "WindowsAndroid is a very cool tool from the Beijing-based startup SocketeQ that lets you run Android 4.0 (Ice Cream Sandwich) as a native application on Windows Vista, Windows 7, or Windows 8 machines. The creators tell us they have a deep background in virtualization, operating system, and graphics technologies, and have been working on the project for years. Essentially, WindowsAndroid allows you not only to execute Android apps on your Windows computer, but also use the browser, not to mention every other component of the operating system."

This is not the same as the remote debugging for Chrome on Android your cite. This is the ability to actually run ICS 4.0 as a VM on your PC. No android device is actually required. The also appear to have a goal to run Android as the native OS on desktop hardware. Interesting, as Microsoft is trying to make their OS look and feel like an app-centric OS like apple and android, someone is trying to go the other direction.

The data sheet on thier now slash dotted website, mentioned an is abstraction layer, full porting of the dalvik VM and integration with host features such as graphics acceleration and media codecs. Sounds like a port of the OS and apps which use the dalvik VM would run just fine. Maybe apps the need more than that won't work.

I'm just guessing, but it seems likely that an application using native code wouldn't run in their environment. Of course, they already are less portable even between actual hardware, so it's no surprise there.

how many of you would think it twice before willingly installing software from a chinese software company -- given all the news we hear recently about chinese companies being denied access to important western markets due to security reasons and all.

Sandbox it. It's an Android emulator, if it can't run in a sandbox at full mobile device speeds, it's not worth using. If it can't run in a sandbox because it requires administrator access to your boot sector, delete with extreme prejudice.

I agree. I was going to post that here as well, and face the risk of getting modded down. it's simple - why give a chinese company access to your computer, where they can snoop PWs, IDs, CCs, SSNs, etc?

Why give Microsoft access to your computer, which in turn gives access to the NSA, Chinese, Indians and whom ever else has placed backdoors in there. And no matter what OS you use, every time you open your Browser you give limited data to whatever Website you browse. Your Information isn't safe, anywhere.

Except, of course, the GP's point happens all the time and yours is imaginary whackjobbery.

You mean the accusations without proof from the US government? The same government that's been waging a cyber-war against other countries in secret for years now? The same government who can run surveillance on their own citizens without a warrant by handing someone a post-it note?

That's the point- they're all as bad as each other. Why should I distrust a Chinese product any more than an American one? Neither government has exactly got a rosy reputation for due process in cyberspace. The answer, by the way, is that I don't automatically distrust either; I keep my sensible hat on when installing new software and hardware on my network, and that's it. Any other mindset can only lead to paranoia and madness.

This is just the usual US xenophobia against all things Chinese. If this were an

Nothing wrong with your point that it's bigotted, but China isn't the only country to have people bigotted against them. And I'm not sure they deserve any less skepticism than any of the others. Which is why I prefer GPL software. At least in principle, that can be verified to be honest.

That's the point- they're all as bad as each other. Why should I distrust a Chinese product any more than an American one? Neither government has exactly got a rosy reputation for due process in cyberspace.

You've short circuited your thinking. The difference is that in China, a company is synonymous with the government, but in America, companies and the government are separate.

Do American companies collaborate with the government? Sure, sometimes. Do they comply with government laws that gag them from talking about what they're doing? Sure, sometimes. But if I hear the US government has been killing people with drones, and then I'm thinking about doing business with Instagram, I don't think to myself, "Wait -

By your logic every convenience store, street food vendor and laundry in China is run by the government?If not, why does there have to be an assumption that some tech-based company couldn't simply be a private enterprise like everywhere else?

er . . . about the same worry as any software from anywhere. Do your self protection rituals and don't install it on anything that contains critical information. Look for oddities (unexpected network connections etc) and check for an online community that may show some pedigree for the software.

Trojan software is a real worry but the fact that it comes from China does not seem to me to alter the worry level. ie: be worried and be careful

how many of you would think it twice before willingly installing software from a chinese software company -- given all the news we hear recently about chinese companies being denied access to important western markets due to security reasons and all.

google has lost in China not because of government blocking, but because it sucks in product quality.

That's the dumbest thing I've ever heard. First of all, it does not hinge on "the government", but certain ministry official that want to be well greased. When those are faced between the decision to accept grease from a Chinese and a foreigner, the foreigner always loses; that's why Google's inland competitors are easily pulling ahead. Second, the party recognises the danger of unrestricted flow and exchange of information as provided through Google's search engine, so they would not let them go forward th

Seems like a good thing for android developers. The current simulator is a bit slow.

Honestly devices are better. Getting a $300 Nexus 4 phone or a $200 Nexus 7 tablet for development purposes is the way to go. The simulator is fine for limited use, primarily for different screens to test your user interface, but for day to day work I prefer actual devices. YMMV.

It's spot on. I remember (not very fondly) stuffing around with an Android emulator for a while then saying screw this and using an Android phone with ADB to test the software even in the early stages where emulators built into the IDE would be the preference.

Humm, lots of software products, ones that are very good don't come from the US. Acronis, Kaspersky and others aren't "made in the USA." I would think however that any "free" software that isn't open source would be something that I'd avoid, regardless of who produces it.

I think the last time the US rolled out tanks against it's own citizens was during the 1960's. In the south. But i could have missed a few occasions. (Sometime between "Little Rock" and "I have a dream!", but I can't pin it down any closer after this much time.)

N.B.: When they did it, most citizens outside the area approved. (Or at least most people I knew did.) I don't know whether this is also true in China, but it could well be.

OK, for testing apps, this would be nice, since the Android SDK's emulator sucks for most anything people do in apps these days. The emulator doesn't handle OpenGL ES, and probably a lot of other details I haven't bothered with.

- Graphics acceleration isn't done yet, so presumably will be very slow.
- Anything in an app that's compiled for ARM (e.g. if an app has CPU intensive stuff done in C++) shouldn't work if I understand their approach correctly -- i.e. it's not existing within a virtual machine but rather is a port / recompile of the Android OS to run natively on Windows.

The x86 AVD that comes with the SDK has its up and downs. Nice that it also supports gles2.0 etc. But it crashes a lot which makes it very difficult to use as a test/debug platform. For instance it crashes every time when the IME comes up for text input. In the system, in the API demos,..

How is proprietary software that only runs on proprietary operating systems, is "in early development status" and does something that existing open source software does much better news for nerds or stuff that matters? Did I overlook the advertorial tag?

I always wondered if it could be possible to run android natively on a gnu/linux distribution. The android kernel and linux kernel are so similar. I understand most of the userspace is different, but running in a different cgroups and in a different chroot should provide some help with it. Anybody had some success with that?

Bedrock linux (a while back) seems to aim to allow several different distros to co-exist under the same kernel (i.e. no VM). That would seem like a reasonable approach. I guess the main thing is making an X11 based graphics driver for andriod so that it can display in a window.

Wine runs Windows applications compiled for a compatible CPU architecture. So if one were to cross-compile a Win32 program (e.g. Notepad++) using MinGW to produce an ARM exe then it ought to happily run under wine on one's ARM linux installation (e.g. Ubuntu on a Nexus 7.)

What you're looking at here is the potential sinking of Microsoft's current OS convergence strategy.

MS are pushing Metro on the desktop so that you'll find the Windows phone OS friendly and familiar. Furthermore, they want people to write Metro apps that work on your phone and desktop so that you'll want to have the same OS on both. They hope that this strategy will drag the entrenched iOS and Android users back to the Windows camp. But once this hits a stable version, people will be able to import all t

Well, it's another name--there's nothing particularly westernized about the name "Taiwan" (unless you think that "westernized" is synonymous with "Romanized"). Apparently, the name originally comes from one of the aboriginal languages spoken on the island.